Title:Drug Repurposing: An Emerging Tool for Drug Reuse, Recycling and Discovery
Volume: 13
Issue: 2
Author(s): Supriya Roy, Suneela Dhaneshwar*Bhavya Bhasin
Affiliation:
- Amity Institute of Pharmacy, Amity University Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow Campus,India
Keywords:
Drug reprofiling, retargeting, therapeutic switching, drug rescue, drug repositioning, polypharmacology, serological
biomarkers, drug target.
Abstract: Drug repositioning or repurposing is a revolutionary breakthrough in drug development
that focuses on rediscovering new uses for old therapeutic agents. Drug repositioning can be
defined more precisely as the process of exploring new indications for an already approved drug
while drug repurposing includes overall re-development approaches grounded in the identical
chemical structure of the active drug moiety as in the original product. The repositioning approach
accelerates the drug development process, curtails the cost and risk inherent to drug development.
The strategy focuses on the polypharmacology of drugs to unlocks novel opportunities for logically
designing more efficient therapeutic agents for unmet medical disorders. Drug repositioning also
expresses certain regulatory challenges that hamper its further utilization. The review outlines the
eminent role of drug repositioning in new drug discovery, methods to predict the molecular targets
of a drug molecule, advantages that the strategy offers to the pharmaceutical industries, explaining
how the industrial collaborations with academics can assist in the discovering more repositioning
opportunities. The focus of the review is to highlight the latest applications of drug repositioning in
various disorders. The review also includes a comparison of old and new therapeutic uses of repurposed
drugs, assessing their novel mechanisms of action and pharmacological effects in the management
of various disorders. Various restrictions and challenges that repurposed drugs come
across during their development and regulatory phases are also highlighted.